Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Web & mobile developer & consultant
Editor & contributor at mobiForge
Author of "AMP: Building Accelerated Mobile Pages"
Runs westerntechnological.ie
Latest Articles by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test: can a Spruce Goose really fly?
May 5, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
There has been a lot written recently about Google's mobile-friendly search algorithm update, starting first with SEO expert blogs, and ending up being covered by mainstream media sites. The update promised to penalise sites for not being mobile-friendly... Read More
Webviews and User-Agent strings
April 13, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Much is made of the comparative times spent browsing the web vs engaging with native apps in the apps vs web debate. An often overlooked part of the discussion is that when engaged with a native app some portion of this time is spent actually on the web, via a webview. We'll get to what a webview is in a minute, but for now, what this means is that although the user is in an app, he or she is effectively browsing the web... Read More
The mobile-friendly apocalypse is nigh
April 1, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
April 21st! Mark the date. Circle it. Set your alarms, and put your crash helmet on. If you're not mobile-friendly that is. Because April 21st is the day that your search engine rankings die. It's been called the mobile-friendly apocalypse, mobile-friendly meltdown,a there's even a hashtag, #mobilegeddon, for it, and indeed the world may end for your business. But bad things will only happen if you're not mobile-friendly... Read More
Who wants the Pointer Events API? Everyone, nearly
March 24, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
The Pointer Events API is an HTML5 API with an interesting history. It's an open API that Microsoft developed as an alternative to the more widely supported Touch Events API. Introduced with IE10 for Windows 8, it defined input events unified across Mouse, Touch and Pen input devices... Read More
AngularJS to Opera Mini: You’re just not worth it!
March 2, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Google-backed AngularJS is a popular web application framework providing a client-side MVC architecture. It has been criticised in the past for its performance, particularly on mobile. As observed by Peter-Paul Koch, it's odd that Google was pushing a mobile-challenged framework back in 2012 when it must have been obvious that Android was going to be pretty important to it as a company. Perhaps those who knew weren't those who were pushing AngularJS... Read More
Emoji set to live long and prosper, thanks to Unicode
February 24, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
You've probably seen them. Your mom probably uses them to sign off her texts, and your teenage cousin has likely abandoned the Roman alphabet altogether in their favour. Emoji are everywhere, and love them or loathe them, they can't be ignored... Read More
Using the Google Maps API to display mobile-friendly maps on all devices
February 18, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
In this article we show how to embed a Google Map in a web page so that it will be mobile-friendly and work on all devices, including low-end devices without JavaScript support. To do this, we'll use the Google Maps API for high-end devices that can handle JavaScript, and for low-end we make use of the simpler Google Static Maps API... Read More
Spartan and Vivaldi: The new kids on the browser block
February 4, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
It's a good time in browserland, with two new browsers set to enter the field in 2015. Microsoft is offering Project Spartan, powered by a new rendering engine, EdgeHTML.dll, while ex-Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner's new start-up is offering Vivaldi, which uses the Blink rendering engine. Browser diversity is alive and kicking, it seems, and that can only be a good thing... Read More
App deep linking: Do we really need Facebook App Links and similar services
January 22, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
It seems odd that in 2015 we must address ourselves to the problem of linking resources across a network, but in the version of 2015 we're lumbered with, we live in an appified world, so address ourselves we must. While linking has formed the backbone of the web since the demise of Compuserve and AOL's walled gardens in the mid-nineties, the apps that populate our smartphone home screens are about as interlinked as Compuserve's forums in the early 1990s; which is to say, not very interlinked at all... Read More
Standards and browser compatibility
January 19, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Browser compatibility is hard. Especially on mobile. If you thought things were difficult 10 years ago when there were only a handful of browsers to contend with, then thinking about the situation for mobile may make you dizzy or depressed. For now we live in a world of tens of thousands of devices of wildly variable shapes and sizes and capabilities. And we have to make the web work on all of them... Read More
